Try to Be a Little Kinder

“The conclusion of ten years of correspondence about consciousness, God, mescaline, and the future of civilization was three words.”

'It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and to find, at the end, that one has no more to offer by way of advice than try to be a little kinder.'

After a decade of sustained intellectual effort about consciousness, the reducing valve, the gratuitous grace, and the proper use of a sacred drug, Huxley arrived at kindness.

The conclusion sounds obvious, trivially available to anyone who has read the Sermon on the Mount. Why did it take mescaline and ten years of letters?

Because kindness, as Huxley is using the word, is not the ordinary sentimental thing. It is the practice of seeing other people as they are, with the same direct perception that mescaline temporarily makes possible, rather than as they are useful or threatening to one's purposes.

The direct perception of things as they are, which mescaline enables briefly and which sustained spiritual practice cultivates gradually, produces, when applied to other people, what we call kindness but which is more precisely accuracy, seeing someone as themselves rather than as a function in your life.

The three words are not a disappointment. They are the completion of the argument.

Sources

• Huxley & Osmond, in Moksha (1977)